needsleep

Or get a visa at the correct tier and you can bring your entire family over to enjoy free healthcare and education whilst not paying any taxes. This is happening now and involves inflows of hundreds of thousands of people. It's one of them policies you can't pin on any party. Labour started it. The LibsCons seem intent on carrying it on but that is a mistake, a serious strategic mistake.

We'll need lots more of those. Won't be much else to do.

Not everybody agrees with Hayek but in 1935 he described exactly how unregulated financial institutions can damage an economy. And it came to pass, as a result of Maggies policies and Labour's willingness to continue them that the shadowing banking system grew and grew with London as its global centre. And lo and behold we were ******ed over by leverage, hedge funds, CDOs, CMOs etc... etc... etc.. http://mises.org/books/hayekcollection.pdf "The characteristic peculiarity of these forms of credit is that they spring up without being subject to any central control, but once they have come into existence their convertibility into other forms of money must be possible if a collapse of credit is to be avoided. But it is important not to overlook the fact that these forms of credits owe their existence largely to the expectation that it will be possible to exchange them at the banks against other forms of money when necessary, and that, accordingly, they might never come into existence if people did not expect that the banks would in the future extend credit against them." The mainstream banking sector isn't necessarily where the blame lies. It also lies with the shadow banking sector and the ways that mainstream banks interfaced with it and evolved as a result of their interface with it. It lies with governments for letting this danger build up over decades. It lies with the public as well, the people that provided the demand.

Cameron is right the higher earners will pay more pounds.

They need 25%

My mum and dad have a similar story. My dad was a manager at a hospital and when the hospital closed and sold off the staff housing he bought his house for £17k in 1985. Now worth well in excess of £200k. Some people have been very, very lucky.

£40k deposit - puts it in perspective

Tariffs are a given. Or at least a less-free 'free market'. Neo-liberal policies have failed and trade policies need to be sensibly re-thought and ideological barriers to more controlled global trade dropped. Either that or we can wait for a dollar meltdown, emergency tariffs and a bloody great big war shortly after.

She made the ginger tree spokesman look brilliant.

Ah Fitch, what an excellent track record they have. AAA rated CDOs and all that.

Let's imagine we make deep cuts and the private sector does not pony up the jobs the government 'hopes' it will. Let's imagine that tax revenues drop through the floor and let's imagine that spooks the rating agencies because less revenue = less ability to service debt. I just don't see how anybody thinks cuts of this nature are the magic formula for maintaining a credit rating. They could be exactly the opposite. Rating agencies will react just as negatively if tax revenues dip sharply and remain subdued as they are likely to in a recession/depression. Look at Ireland.

Don't they have these in Ireland too?

Damn you. I wanted RB to tell me it was too much. Then I was going to increase it.

So is the 'traditional' advice to hold 10% of personal wealth in PMs bad advice?

You're right the majority of people who do some kind of tax mitigation on any meaningful scale are usually pretty hardcore. But you would be surprised at how popular thing kind of thing has become. My parents in law surprised me a few years back when they told me they'd moved the proceeds from a house sale to an offshore account - they're not exactly that savvy with their money but they were driven by one thing and that was to stop the tax authorities in the country where they live getting their hands on any of the cash.

I think that is what Danny and his heavy mob are taking aim at. There is a moral angle to this and although people may be behaving in a perfectly legal way some will get worried when the Treasury and PM start talking about clamping down on tax avoidance. I think they're hoping just a few threats will scare individuals into moving money back from offshore. Not quite the fire and brimstone we previously had from Dawn Primalo but it will come: "There is a limit to what we ... regard as acceptable. And that limit is breached when people take advantage of tax breaks in a way Parliament would not have anticipated ... Those who do so must be prepared for us to ... clamp down ... They must recognise they are playing with fire." - Dawn Primalo While the LibsCons may adopt a similar stance they will do little to actually close any loopholes in the law. It will be up to individuals to decide how scared they are by the rantings of a bespectacled ginger muppet. Big business will carry on as before.

Control globally-focused unregulated financial instituations dealing all manner of highly leveraged financial instruments by adjusting the BoE base rate. I can see now why it's all Gordon's fault. If only he'd changed the BoE base rate. If only. He could have really saved the World.

Totally agree. All they had to do was push the buttons and Brown plus dozens of other government officials around the world did the business. A Tory chancellor would have done the same.

Indeed, the precedents for bailouts of hyper-leveraged institutions was already laid down. Take the Federal Reserve-sponsored bailout of 'Long-Term Capital Management' in '98, a hedge fund whose failure threatened to destabilise the financial sector a full 9 years before 2007. Lehman Bros helped bail them out The banks already knew how governments would respond to over-leveraged institutions in difficulty. If they would bail out an unregulated shadow banking institution in that way then............

I don't think they could have. The credit bubble was partly driven by unregulated institutions using highly leveraged financial instruments. When TSHTF the phantom credit created had to be converted into real money. The real question is was the level of regulation correct and the simple answer is we know it wasn't. There was no way the total level of credit in the economy could have been centrally controlled with the regulation that was in place.

Oh dear. have people really fallen for that crap.

What is the debt as a percentage of GDP projected to be at the end of 2010? And how would that comapre to Germany, France and Belgium? Go find out. And surprise yourself. Disclaimer: needsleep is not saying we don't need to reduce the deficit. I agree that we do.

Tubs of Ainsley Harriot cous cous £4 at Costco. Good for 30 servings. Best before date 2012. I'm getting a few.

Haha, so true.

was working on a government site down south a few years ago and they had an equality and diversity dept. that took up nearly a whole floor of one of the buildings. They had two big office spaces, an interview room and their own dedicated meeting area. And in a spectacular celebration of diversity with only a couple of exceptions the staff in it were all white middle aged females.